January 13, 2026

Welcome back to another edition of my yearly best things but also me bragging about things I did this year that I'm proud of. I'm trying something new this year by putting things back on my personal Neocities site because I like the idea of having my own site I control and don't need any of the social stuff that Substack has. Instead of actually learning web dev, I'm just writing this in Obsidian and exporting the note to HTML. Hopefully its a pleasant reading experience still!

This year I DM'd my first campaign from start to finish and had a great time and wrote all about it here but Dungeons and Dragons 5e sure wasn't my favourite system this year. In the fall my friend started a Lancer campaign and I have absolutely fallen in love with it. It's a mech RPG with a combat system that is robust yet not overly complicated but also the mechs can cast spells. It's amazing.

The combat mechanics are the shining star of the system because the roleplay elements are fairly light. Every single one of the combats I have been part of have felt unique yet every one has been nail-bitingly close. Lancer is designed for different combat scenarios in mind like capturing points, pushing payloads or clearing zones that allow for its different mech mechanics to shine. Our party also has the privilege of access to a (heavily overworked) 3D printer so we have been able to have in-person combats with real terrain height that elevates the cool factor. Also shoutouts to my GM for balancing and running these combats so well, this system has made me yell about dice more than any other so far.

Looking like Giant's Causeway over here

The other beautiful part about Lancer is its mech leveling system that really scratches the RPG building part of my brain. In a system like DnD you have maybe 10 levels that you will probably put into one or two classes over the course of campaign because the power scaling only really comes from deep investment. In Lancer there's more than 30 mechs with a max 3 levels in each so you are encouraged to fan out and mix and match different mechs together for fun synergies. The community is also great for figuring out mech builds but I do it for the love of the game and have spent many hours just thinking about what fun combination of mech I can put together for my next level up.

Also the tools for the game are amazing for wrangling some of the complexity. COMP/CON is its online character sheet manager that makes theorycrafting so much easier and there are so many community created cheat sheets and tools that can fit all the rules you need on a single sheet of paper. DnD could never.

Featuring the only decent photo of me while I was storytelling for the 2nd time

Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game that sorta took over SFU Tabletop and then my life this year and that's great actually. It really started to click for me when I realized I should treat it as a social deduction game and not a social deduction game. My friend introduced me to a group that does regular in-person games around the Lower Mainland and I think its the fastest I've ever gone from meeting people as total strangers to considering them friends. Having never been part of a recreational sports league, this is what I imagine is an appeal of doing those as an adult because you can meet with people on a consistent basis to do an activity together.

I remember the first time attending one of the public games and feeling nervous about meeting people. But once everyone sits down and the game begins, it was so easy to talk to strangers because its understood that you're both playing a game and even if you don't know each other, you both know how the game works and will fulfill your role within the game first. Then after the game is over, you can make proper introductions and now have a shared experience that can use to bolster regular conversations. It's like magic.

Talking about the game itself, its design of having a massive set of roles that can be put together in different combinations also scratches that RPG building part of my brain. It keeps every game fresh and presents a little brain puzzle every time that you can try and sit down and solve for satisfying results. Not that I'm good at that. Having forced some of my friends to participate in a game which I storytold, it also satisfies the same part of my brain that likes GMing where I can create a scenario for my friends to participate in and watch what happens knowing all the information.

Final thing, there's a lot of good Clocktower content online but my personal favourite is No Rolls Barred's in-person Clocktower series. It does a great job of explaining what's going on which helped me learn a lot while also having all the fun in-person shenanigans.

I've mostly started to stabilize my podcast rotation but there's a new one in the mix that was recommended to me and has stuck around! Let's Learn Everything is a learning podcasts where every episode the hosts bring a topic to share with the hosts and listeners. Personal favourites from when I started listening to now include the evolution of eyes, superheavy elements, and sneezing.

During covid especially I think I got a bit disillusioned with some internet content on the STEM fields (gonna blame that one on LinkedIn) but LLE has reignited the youthful me that memorized the periodic table and drew lots of spaceships. It turns out you can love science and technology while also having a heart and worshipping billionaires! Who knew!?

This podcast also gets my personal award for fully committing to audio bits that are exactly my type of humor. Every episode there's some audio joke or reference or something that did not need to have that much time spent on it but I am here for its existence.

The game board halfway through a full day campaign

I played 2 different 12-hour space opera board games this year: Twilight Imperium (4th Edition) and the Arcs: The Blighted Reach campaign. I'm sorry to the TI lovers out there but I love the Arcs campaign so much more. It just comes down to the reason that love playing board games is I get to hang out with friends and having fun stories to tell afterwards. The Arcs campaign is perfect for doing that and it's something I will always crave even though I suck at it.

The fates system is one of my favourites for enabling this. When you start the game you choose a fate which is essentially your faction but is flavoured more as an ideological ideal for how to lead the reach with mechanics to back it up. Then between acts, depending on how you perform you can either choose a new fate to stick with your current one and watch it evolve. This continued evolution of your faction throughout the game can create fun narratives that you can fill in the blanks for. For example in my first game I was a pro-empire fungus destroyer who couldn't hold power and decided to try pacifism, failed dramatically and decided to side with the fungus for the final act. While the randomness of each fate may not be great for developing a strategy for winning the game, it makes each playthrough unique and reaching the end, whether win or loss, feels like a journey.

I remember this one because its the mystery of the woman in the woods

I went back to China this year and was once again reminded how lacking my Mandarin is. This time I actually did something about it through! My friend recommended the book Remembering Traditional Hanzi by James W. Heisig and getting an Anki deck that follows it and I went ahead and did that. Well, the deck I used is simplified and I put in traditional after realizing there's a lot of traditional around here.

I have been doing these cards daily for about 4 months now and while I'm nowhere near reading level, I'm slowly recognizing characters on food and street signs. The Heisig books break down the memorization into radicals and give them little stories to remember the meaning of them which works very well for my brain. I spend about 15 minutes a day practicing and am about halfway through the first book. So a long way to go but I'm a lot further along now than if I never had started at all.

Anki itself has also been amazing with its flexibility. The deck I started with has a lot of features like a hints system and audio for the pronunciation that really feels like a complete package. And as mentioned I was able to hack it open a bit to insert the traditional characters. This is the first time I've used it for long term memorization like this and I'm surprising myself with how much I can remember and how well Anki is at bringing back up characters that I almost forgot.

Dogs confirmed

This is mostly just a brag that me and 12 friends biked to 5 Costcos in the Lower Mainland in a day and made custom shirts for the occasion. We saw a bear in Coquitlam and had to turn around, met another group that was doing the same thing but over the course of 2 days and doing EVERY Costco in the Lower Mainland, and probably only broke 2 or 3 laws while doing it. I also learned how fast you can get shirts custom printed and how relatively cheap they are.

I have no photo evidence of this but I also biked up SFU Burnaby. One of the most tiring experiences of the summer but the feeling of reaching the top really is worth it even if it feels like your lungs are collapsing. Then rode all the way down the mountain and doing that makes you stop breathing out of fear instead. Maybe something I shouldn't have done on my commuter bike but I made it.

This is one of the few screenshots I have because there's so much action and so little time to take cool screenshots

I don't really want to talk too much about this game because the internet discourse around it gets weird and if you're interested you've probably heard enough about it. Might as well call it Clair Well-known.
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No? Ok.
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Anyway its really good and the two things I'll say is it. It's the first game where I've been able to talk to my friends about it and engage in deep life questions because of what happens and its cool that a game was able to do that. Second is that the small detail the actions in combat are mapped to face buttons so you don't need to navigate the menus and instead can muscle memory your way through moves is smart and makes turn-based combat feel so much faster.

I didn't have any blockbuster books that totally blew my mind away this year but I read a couple that I have now looked back on and think fondly of.

Two fiction books that are about families and generational trauma and that's about the only way their content is the same are Real Americans by Rachel Khong and Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. They're both books that I couldn't put down and continue to stick with me. However I also think they're both good books to jump into blind so I will say no more.

I also read the first 2 books from the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett off a friend's recommendation - The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. They're a solid fantasy mystery that's currently ongoing and I'm excited for what comes next. It follows an investigative duo as they solve crimes in a fantasy world with a plant-based magic system that feels fresh and unique. The detective is very good at putting things together for a solve but doesn't like the outside while her assistant has a magically altered sense of memory and can perfectly memorize everything which is a fun dynamic that is perfectly set up for the "you've seen all the evidence, now see the smart one put it all together in a satisfying way" magic trick I always enjoy in a good mystery.

Here's some videos that I liked

That's a lot of things this year! And after looking back at it a lot of these things are things that I do with friends or have been recommended to me by friends. In a way I have accomplished my goal because I first started doing these recaps as ways to passively tell my friends to share some interests with me and now here we are. So shoutouts to you good reader! Here's to this year and even more good things to discover.